Chapter 16 #2
She wanted the man who had been an absolute coward for ninety seconds and a liar for fifty-two days, and who had then spent nineteen months doing the least rewarded work she had ever seen a human being do — no audience, no credit, no access, no return, answering the worst questions she could build inside the hour, every time, for four months, and burning everything he had on the way past and arranging it so she would never hear about it.
She was not confused about which of those men he was. He was both. That was the arrangement, and she had been handed all the information, which was the one thing he had ever actually owed her, and she had it now, and there was nothing left to find out.
At half past five the gray came up over the water.
Imogen picked up her phone and wrote:
Come at eleven.
He came at eleven.
He parked outside the gate. It was shut. She had shut it. She watched him get out and stand there for a second, and then he pressed the buzzer, and the sound of it went through the house.
She let it go.
She stood in the hall for about four seconds with her hand on the panel and she let a man stand on the wrong side of a closed thing for exactly as long as she wanted to — not long — and that, she thought, was the only piece of this she was ever going to take for herself.
Then she opened the gate.
She watched it swing on the camera. She went out onto the drive and stood on the gravel while he came up it, and he stopped six feet away with his hands at his sides.
"I got a call from the insurers," he said.
"I don't care."
"Imogen—"
"I don't care, Cormac." She came down the step. "I have been up since Tuesday and I have got about nine things to say and I'd like to say them before you make it a conversation, so stand there."
He stood there.
"I'm not doing this because you testified," she said.
"I want that on the record and I want it first. If you'd said I don't recall on that stand I'd have been standing here anyway.
I decided at four o'clock yesterday morning and the testimony was two days before and it wasn't the reason.
Do you understand why I'm telling you that? "
"Because you don't want it to be a transaction."
"Because it isn't one." Her voice was steady.
"You did the worst thing anybody's ever done to me and then you did nineteen months of work that nobody watched.
Both of those are true. I'm not trading one off against the other and I'm never going to, and if you spend the rest of your life trying to get the ledger to come out level I'll go, because I can't live with a man doing sums about me. "
"I won't."
"You will. You'll try. And when you do I'll say the word ledger and you'll stop."
"All right."
"Second thing." She took a breath. "I had somewhere else to go."
Cormac's jaw moved.
"I want you to hear all of it, because you're going to want to be grateful and I'd rather you were clear instead.
I had the directorship and my own name and this house and my mother's house and a man in Bristol who asked me to dinner in June and who would have been extremely good to me.
It was a real life. It had nothing wrong with it.
I sat in that kitchen all night and looked at it properly and I could have had every bit of it, and I'm not taking it, and that is not because it wasn't good enough. "
"Then why," he said.
"Because I'd rather have this one," Imogen said. "That's it. That's the entire reason. I want the difficult one with you in it."
"Third thing, and this is the one that matters."
She stood on her own gravel in September and said the sentences she had been assembling since four in the morning.
"I am never going to absorb anything again," she said.
"Not one thing. Not a woman in the guest wing, not a dinner I don't want to go to, not a sentence you decide I'm better off not having.
The way I was for eight years is finished and it is not coming back, and you are going to find that much harder to live with than you think, because it was extremely comfortable for you and you did not have to ask for it once. "
"I know."
"You don't. But you will."
"Yes," he said.
"You tell me things now. Not the organized nine-minute version — the actual thing, the day it happens, badly, before you've worked out how it sounds. If you catch yourself deciding what I can handle, that's the failure. Not the lie. The deciding."
"Yes."
"And if you ever again let me walk around inside a wrong story about my own life," Imogen said, "I will not put you out of the house, I will file, that afternoon, and you will never see me again."
"Understood."
"Say it back."
"If I let you believe something I know is wrong," he said, "you'll file that afternoon and I will not see you again."
"Good."
She stood there in the sun.
"Last thing," she said. "This is not a trial run.
I've thought about saying it that way — we'll see how it goes, a few months and we'll talk — and I'm not going to, because that's a way of keeping a door half shut so I can say later that I never really opened it.
I've had enough of doors." She looked at him.
"This is a decision. I'm making it today, in front of you, at eleven in the morning, sober, with somewhere else to go. You're my husband. Come home."
Cormac Severin stood on the gravel and did not move for a second.
Then he said, "I've got one thing and then I'm done talking for about a year."
"Say it."
"I'm not going to tell you I deserve this, because I don't, and you've just spent ten minutes explaining why that's not the currency.
" His voice was not entirely working. "So I'll tell you what I'll do instead, which is: every time I want to manage you, I'm going to say the thing out loud and let it be ugly.
Every time. For as long as it takes for it to stop being a decision. "
"That's the right answer."
"It's the only one I've got."
"Then come inside," Imogen said, "and shut my gate behind you."
He shut the gate.
She heard it go — the slow hydraulic travel of it, nothing like the other sound, the one she had made herself listen to about four hundred times over nineteen months until it was just a gate — and then he came up the drive, and she was already going to him, and they met about eight feet from the door.
He did not touch her first.
Nineteen months and he still did not touch her first; he stopped in front of her with his hands down, and Imogen thought, he is going to do that for the rest of his life, and she reached up and took his face in both hands and pulled it down to hers.
He made a sound against her mouth like something coming apart.
Then his arms went around her so hard her feet nearly left the gravel, and one hand came up into her hair and the other spread flat between her shoulder blades — the exact place, the low place, and she felt it land and she let it land, and she did not flinch and she did not think about a screen, and that was the moment she knew it was actually over.
"Inside," she said.
"Imogen—"
"Cormac, if you ask me if I'm sure I will put you back through that gate."
He got her as far as the back stairs.
She had known he would. She had thought about it at four in the morning and had been faintly ashamed of how specifically she had thought about it, and then at eleven fifteen she was up two steps with her back against the wall and her husband's mouth on her throat and the cardigan already somewhere on the floor of the hall.
"Bedroom," she said.
"Yes."
"I'm serious this time."
"I heard you," he said, and did not move, and neither did she.
They got there eventually. The light was all wrong for it — eleven in the morning in September with the sun coming off the water and every curtain in the room open — and she went to close them and he caught her hand.
"Leave it."
"It's the middle of the day."
"Leave it," Cormac said. "I've had nineteen months of the dark."
So she left it.